Most retailers and distributors today offer a variety of different products (and/or services) from a number of different vendors, manufacturers or other entities (hereinafter “vendors”). In order to provide incentive programs to encourage salespeople or other employees or agents (hereinafter “salespeople”) to increase their effort to sell certain products or services, the vendors often provide or offer incentive (or “spiff”) programs, which provide prizes or monetary rewards based upon, among other things, sales of selected products, sales of groups of products, a salesperson's performance, quotas, or ad hoc programs. Incentive programs operate under several principles. One of the principles behind incentive programs is that by allowing other employees at the same level to see how fellow employees and/or competitors are doing, the employee is encouraged to match or beat the achievements of his or her fellow employees or competitors. Another principle behind incentive programs is that by rewarding a positive act, there is a likelihood that the act would be repeated to the benefit of the salesperson, distributor and vendor.
Traditional incentive programs often involved manually inputting information related to the incentive programs and then retaining hard copies of the compiled information. As there are often a number of different incentive programs relating to different products and vendors running at a time, it is thus difficult for vendors and distributors to coordinate or monitor the various spiff programs. As a result, employees may be unaware of the all of the various programs, thereby rendering many programs ineffective. The large number of incentive programs also created problems in that it often took time to process the claims made under the various programs. Longer delays or problems incurred in the incentive programs often result in angering or otherwise discouraging the employees from meeting or exceeding certain performance levels.
Due to the number of different incentive programs and the difficulties in monitoring the programs, it has also been difficult for vendors to determine the effectiveness of the various incentive programs. Accordingly, vendors may continue to operate or run spiff programs that result in fewer sales and a lower net profit.
Therefore, there is a need for a system and method that streamlines all of the sales incentive or spiff programs from inception to award recognition. There is also a need for an incentive program system that allows interaction with individuals at all levels of the spiff programs. There is also a need for a system and method that centralizes the implementation, monitoring and reporting on all spiff programs that pertain to the user, while being economical and easy to manufacture and/or use.